David, may I just point out - if it wasn't clear from my message before - that
the page with news.php?id=201 is actually never "exposed" to the user.
By virtue of the rewrite rule, all the user sees is the "proper" URL, not the one
with the GET query string.
Patrick
-----Original Message-----
From: David Woolley [mailto:david@djwhome.demon.co.uk]
Sent: Tue 11/11/2003 20:57
To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
Cc:
Subject: Re: Redirection
> news item has its own url (e.g. www.salford.ac.uk/news/details/201/) but what's
> effectively happening is that, internally and totally transparent to the user, the page
> being displayed is actually www.salford.ac.uk/news/news.php?id=201 (which you
Even with the original NCSA server, and presumably with Apache, you could
have http://www.example.com/news.php/201 and the 201 is passed to the
script as an environment variable and can be parsed for use as the selection
parameter. You should explicitly output a Last-Modified-Date header, and/or
Expires and Cache-Control: max-age headers, as caches cannot infer a
safe expiry date otherwise. If you are feeling really good, you should
also implement If-Modified-Since headers properly (or another correlator).
I am actually rather irritated by these ?id= pages as it shows that the
software designer completely failed to understand what a URL is. It is
not technical instructions on how to create the page, but a structured
name for the page. Even if the HTML is generated from non-HTML source, there
is no reason why the outside world should know that.